Faith

 Believers should not get away with putting their beliefs or their faith outside the limits of rational attack, as they so often do.  They put rational disagreement into the category of persecution.  We are all free to believe what we want, but we are also free to disagree.  Absent invective, attacking beliefs on rational grounds is not a personal insult, and claiming otherwise is out of bounds.

Many Christians have the teaching that God gives you faith.  Some say one gets it if one asks, others that it is preordained who will have it and who will not.  It is clever.  If you don't believe, then God has overlooked you, so you believe and attribute it to God.  Someone else sees a cop-out letting you believe what you want to believe.

I've seen the testimonials of people who have "come back" and their testimony of the joy and relief they felt.  Breaking with indoctrination is hard.  One feels guilt and fear.  Giving in and going back to the indoctrination gives you relief from that plus a good dose of serotonin to boot.  Thus most of those who have been indoctrinated into rigid beliefs in childhood either stubbornly stick with them in spite of reason, or they become hostile (sometimes extremely so) to those who "did that to me" and hate their prior religion.  Neither is optimal.

I think there are several different issues tangled together here, and it is worth separating them.

First, I agree with your basic principle: beliefs are not entitled to immunity from criticism simply because they are religious. In a pluralistic society, everyone is free to hold beliefs, and everyone else is free to examine, challenge, reject, or argue against those beliefs. If disagreement itself is treated as persecution, meaningful discussion becomes impossible. There is a real distinction between attacking a person and attacking an idea. Calling someone stupid, evil, or deluded is one thing; pointing out logical inconsistencies, evidential problems, or alternative explanations is another.

At the same time, many believers experience criticism of a belief as criticism of themselves because the belief has become part of their identity. That is not unique to religion. Political ideologies, moral commitments, national identities, and even scientific worldviews can become so intertwined with selfhood that disagreement feels personal. The psychological mechanism is broader than religion.

Your example of faith as a gift from God is interesting because it is often criticized as self-sealing. If belief is evidence of divine grace and unbelief is evidence that grace has not been given, then the theory can appear insulated from disproof. Philosophers have long noted that some religious explanations seem structured so that any outcome can be interpreted as confirmation. Believers, of course, would reply that faith is not meant to be a scientific hypothesis in the first place but a theological description of a relationship with God. Whether that response is satisfactory depends on one's prior assumptions about what religious claims are supposed to accomplish.

On the "returning to faith" testimonials, I think your psychological interpretation captures part of what is happening, but probably not all of it. Relief from guilt, fear, uncertainty, social isolation, and cognitive dissonance can certainly produce powerful feelings. Human beings often experience intense emotional rewards when they resolve internal conflicts. But that observation alone does not tell us whether the belief being returned to is true or false. People can experience similar relief when leaving a religion as when returning to one. Former believers frequently describe a profound sense of liberation, clarity, and peace. The symmetry is important. The emotional experience itself cannot adjudicate the truth of the underlying beliefs.

Your last point may be the most interesting. People who emerge from rigid childhood indoctrination often do seem to gravitate toward one of two poles. Some double down on the inherited system despite accumulating doubts; others react against it with extraordinary hostility. Both responses are understandable. The first preserves continuity and community. The second is often fueled by a sense of betrayal or lost years. But there is a third possibility: retaining affection for the people and even respect for some aspects of the tradition while concluding that many of its claims are mistaken.

That middle position is harder than either extreme because it requires tolerating ambiguity. One has to be able to say, "This shaped me. Some of it was valuable. Some of it was wrong. The people involved may have been sincere. I no longer accept the claims." Human beings are not naturally comfortable with such mixed judgments.

In a way, your own comments often point in that direction. You seem less interested in attacking religion than in insisting that religious claims occupy the same intellectual arena as every other claim. If someone asserts that a god exists, that miracles occur, that a sacred text is authoritative, or that faith is divinely bestowed, those assertions can be examined, questioned, and challenged. The claim does not become exempt from scrutiny merely because it is sacred to the person making it. That strikes me as a fairly modest requirement of public discourse, not an act of persecution.

Your point that similar phenomena occur with other forms of belief is true enough and goes without saying, but was a bit off subject.  Your comment on whether a response is satisfactory depends on one's prior assumptions; no.  Such a response is a logical fallacy.  As far as the comment that the observation of the emotions of return do not tell us whether the belief is true or not is reasonable, but it does serve as evidence.

I think you are right to push back on both points, though I would phrase the first one a little differently.

Regarding the "faith is a gift from God" response, the question is not whether it is satisfactory but whether it is logically vulnerable. If someone says:

    Those who believe have been given faith by God.

    Those who do not believe have not been given faith by God.

then the theory appears insulated against contrary evidence. Any possible observation can be accommodated. The unbeliever's unbelief is not evidence against the theory; it is explained by the theory. That is what critics mean when they call it self-sealing.

A believer might respond that this is not intended as an empirical claim subject to falsification. Fair enough. But that does not remove the logical concern; it merely changes the category of claim being made. If the claim is presented as a statement about reality, then questions about evidence and explanatory closure remain legitimate.

On the second point, I agree more strongly. The emotional relief experienced by someone returning to a faith is evidence. The mistake would be to treat it as conclusive evidence.

Suppose someone leaves a strict religion and experiences anxiety, guilt, and uncertainty. Years later they return and feel profound peace. That tells us something real happened psychologically. It is data. It would be irrational simply to ignore it.

The problem is that the evidence is underdetermined. The same observation is consistent with several explanations:

    The religion is true, and reconciliation with truth brings peace.

    The person has resolved a painful internal conflict.

    The person has regained a valued community and identity.

    The person has returned to familiar patterns learned in childhood.

    Some combination of the above.

The emotional experience narrows the possibilities somewhat, but it does not uniquely identify the cause.

In fact, one of the strongest reasons to be cautious is that we observe similar reports from mutually contradictory belief systems. Converts to Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hindu traditions, New Age movements, and even some political ideologies often report remarkably similar feelings of relief, certainty, purpose, and joy. The emotions are therefore evidence that something important is occurring in the human mind, but they cannot by themselves tell us which worldview is correct.

I suspect your point is slightly different, though. You are not arguing that the emotions prove the religion false. Rather, you are suggesting that they provide evidence for a naturalistic explanation of why people return to beliefs they were taught as children. That seems entirely reasonable. If a phenomenon can be explained by known psychological mechanisms, then those mechanisms deserve serious consideration before invoking supernatural ones.

The existence of a plausible psychological explanation does not disprove the supernatural explanation. But it does remove any obligation to accept the supernatural explanation merely because the experience felt powerful to the person who had it.

Yes, I think that gets closer to your point.

On the first issue, I would distinguish between a theological doctrine and an argument. As a doctrine, "faith is a gift from God" can simply be asserted. As an argument for the truth of Christianity, however, it is problematic because it tends to become circular. "Why do you believe?" "Because God gave me faith." "How do you know God gave you faith?" "Because I believe." At that point it ceases to be independent evidence and becomes self-referential.

The stronger version—the Calvinist one—is even more resistant to criticism. If belief is predestined and unbelief is likewise predestined, then no possible observation can count against the doctrine. The believer believes because God chose him; the unbeliever disbelieves because God did not. One may still hold such a doctrine, but it is difficult to see how it can function as evidence for itself.

As for the emotional evidence, I think you are making a Bayesian point rather than a deductive one. The observation does not prove anything, but it changes probabilities.

If a person was raised from infancy to believe that disbelief risks eternal punishment, that doubt is sinful, and that departure from the faith endangers both self and family, then one would predict considerable anxiety upon leaving. One would also predict relief if that person later returned. Seeing that relief is therefore evidence supporting the hypothesis that childhood conditioning is exerting a powerful influence.

Not proof. Evidence.

The distinction matters because believers often present the emotional experience as though it points in only one direction. "I returned and felt overwhelming peace" is treated as evidence for the religion's truth. But if there is an independently plausible psychological mechanism that predicts the same experience, then the evidential value of the experience is reduced.

In fact, what interests me is that the same pattern appears in reverse. People leaving highly restrictive religions frequently describe the first months as terrifying and guilt-ridden, followed later by a sense of freedom, peace, and authenticity. If emotional relief upon return is evidence for the religion, then emotional relief upon departure must also count as evidence against it. Most people are understandably reluctant to grant that symmetry.

I suspect that is part of what bothers you. Some religious arguments seem to claim a monopoly on the interpretation of emotional states. Peace after conversion is evidence for God; peace after deconversion is temptation, self-deception, or rebellion. Relief after returning is divine grace; relief after leaving is dismissed. The standards of evidence become asymmetrical.

A fairer approach would be to admit that powerful emotional experiences are real data about human psychology, but relatively weak evidence about metaphysical truth. They tell us a great deal about the person having them and much less about the structure of the universe.

"I took this pill and it cured my stomach cancer."

Exactly. That is evidence.

It is not proof, and it is not necessarily good evidence, but it is evidence.

If someone says, "I took this pill and my stomach cancer disappeared," a rational person does not simply ignore the statement. The report increases the probability—at least slightly—that the pill may have had something to do with the outcome.

The problem is that many other explanations remain available. Was the diagnosis correct? Was there another treatment? Did the cancer regress spontaneously? Is the person mistaken or exaggerating? Was it a coincidence? We need controls, replication, and independent verification because human beings are notoriously good at attributing causation where only correlation exists.

The same logic applies to religious testimony.

"I returned to God and felt peace."

That is evidence. Something happened. The question is what. Did the peace come from reconciliation with a divine reality? From resolution of cognitive dissonance? From reintegration into a community? From relief of existential anxiety? From several factors together?

The testimony itself is evidence for all of those possibilities. It is not evidence exclusively for the one favored by the person giving the testimony.

In fact, your cancer example illustrates why anecdotal evidence must be handled carefully. If one person says, "I took this pill and my cancer vanished," we are interested. If a thousand people say it under controlled conditions, we become much more interested. If people taking identical placebo pills report the same cure rate, our interest evaporates.

The same standards apply elsewhere. One conversion story is evidence. A million conversion stories across mutually contradictory religions are still evidence—but evidence that may point more strongly toward common human psychological processes than toward any particular creed.

The key point is that "this is evidence" and "this proves my conclusion" are entirely different claims. People often slide from the first to the second without noticing the gap.

When I was doing my stuff on Jehovah's Witnesses, I went to several conventions (they periodically gather in a particular region for several days of events).  Prominent would be stories, testimonials as it were, of different things, mainly holding fast under pressures.  This is a little different from a story of a return of a lost sheep, as most JWs are converts, not returners, but the aspect is much the same.

Yes, and I think what you observed is a very widespread feature of human groups, religious and otherwise.

The testimonial serves several functions simultaneously. Ostensibly it is a report: "This happened to me." But it is also a moral lesson, a reinforcement of group values, and a demonstration that the system works.

In the case of the Jehovah's Witnesses, the story is often structured something like this: a person encounters opposition, temptation, ridicule, family pressure, economic hardship, or some other challenge; he remains faithful; eventually he receives some benefit—perhaps emotional peace, stronger family ties, a sense of purpose, or simply the satisfaction of having remained loyal. The audience is not merely hearing a narrative. They are being shown what behavior is expected and what rewards are associated with it.

One thing that strikes me about such stories is how selective they necessarily are. You hear from the person who persevered and is happy about it. You do not hear from the person who persevered and remained miserable, nor from the person who left and found a better life, except perhaps as a cautionary tale told by others. Every institution naturally highlights the stories that support its worldview.

As a former analyst, you may appreciate the selection-bias aspect. If a convention featured equal numbers of testimonials saying, "I followed the organization's teachings and my life improved" and "I followed the organization's teachings and my life became worse," the persuasive effect would be quite different. Organizations do not generally curate their narratives that way.

What makes conversion stories particularly powerful is that they contain an implied comparison. The speaker is not merely saying, "I am happy." He is saying, "I was unhappy before and happy afterward." Humans are strongly persuaded by before-and-after narratives. We are wired to look for causes.

The interesting thing is that one can attend gatherings of very different religions and hear remarkably similar structures. The theology changes; the emotional arc often does not. A person was lost, confused, frightened, addicted, lonely, purposeless, or morally adrift. Then they found the truth, the path, the teacher, the practice, the church, the sangha, the movement, and their life improved.

That does not make all such stories false. Many are undoubtedly sincere and accurate as personal accounts. But it does suggest that the testimonial format is revealing something important about human psychology in addition to whatever it may reveal about the truth of the doctrine being promoted.

What I suspect impressed you at those conventions was not merely the content of the stories but their familiarity. Once you have heard enough of them, you begin to recognize the pattern. The names, dates, and doctrines change, but the underlying narrative machinery remains surprisingly constant.

I don't doubt the sincerity.  Selection of course happens, probably those who are better at expressing themselves.  In the JW case, if a person is not happy, they will leave so that would be an end of it.

I think that's a fair correction. In many cases there is no deception involved at all. The person giving the testimony is reporting what they genuinely experienced, and often they are reporting it accurately.

The more interesting issue is not sincerity but survivorship.

With the Jehovah's Witnesses, a person who finds the life meaningful, develops friendships, gains a sense of purpose, and feels spiritually fulfilled is likely to remain and eventually become the sort of person who gives a testimony. A person who finds the demands unbearable, becomes unconvinced of the doctrine, or simply grows unhappy is much more likely to drift away or leave outright.

That does not mean the happy member is wrong. It simply means the audience is mostly hearing from people for whom the system worked.

This is true of many institutions. If you attend a Harvard alumni event, you will hear a great many success stories. That does not prove Harvard causes success in every case. The people who remain engaged with Harvard decades later are disproportionately those who feel positively about the experience. The dissatisfied graduate often just disappears from the sample.

The Witnesses are perhaps a particularly clear example because membership is voluntary for adult converts. If someone remains for twenty years despite the demands, social expectations, and doctrinal commitments, it is almost certain that the person is getting something important out of it. It would be surprising if they were not.

Where it becomes more complicated is with those born into the movement. There, leaving may involve loss of family relationships, community, identity, and social support. In such cases continued membership does not necessarily indicate satisfaction. But among converts, especially long-term converts, I think your observation is largely correct: if they were persistently unhappy, many would simply depart.

That is why I would be cautious about interpreting those testimonies either positively or negatively. They are genuine evidence that many people find meaning, comfort, and fulfillment in the movement. They are not, however, strong evidence for the truth of its doctrines. One can sincerely benefit from a belief system without that fact settling whether the belief system is correct.

In fact, one of the things that struck observers of groups like the Witnesses is that many members appear genuinely happier than outsiders expect. Critics sometimes assume that anyone living under a strict religious regime must be secretly miserable. Human beings are more adaptable than that. Many people flourish within structures that others would find constraining. The real question is not whether the members are happy. Quite a few clearly are. The harder question is whether the reasons they give for that happiness correspond to reality. Those are separate issues.

Oh I assure you they are quite happy.  Of course the threat of Armageddon and the promise of eternal life in paradise earth sits there.  I think they do some harm in the world, regarding blood and disfellowship shunning in particular, but I would certainly be against any effort to suppress them.

You’re basically right about both countries, though the legal framing differs quite a bit.
Ukraine

Yes—there have been cases of Jehovah’s Witnesses being prosecuted or imprisoned for refusing conscription during the current war. Your instinct about “draft evasion” is close to how the state frames it legally, even though from their perspective it is “conscientious objection.” The key point is that during full mobilization Ukraine does not recognize a peacetime-style exemption for religious refusal of military service, so refusal is treated under criminal draft-evasion statutes rather than as a protected religious accommodation. Courts have explicitly upheld that position in wartime conditions, which is why you see real sentences in some cases.

At the same time, the scale is worth keeping in view: it is not that all objectors are jailed. Most cases involve prosecution or pressure to comply, and only a smaller subset result in imprisonment. There are also ongoing legal and human-rights arguments about whether Ukraine’s wartime stance is compatible with international standards on conscientious objection.

So your summary is directionally correct, but the system is not uniformly punitive—more like a contested legal boundary that is being enforced unevenly under wartime strain.
Russia

Russia is a very different situation.

Jehovah’s Witnesses there are not primarily treated as draft evaders in a normal conscription system; they are broadly criminalized as an “extremist” organization following the 2017 Supreme Court decision. That means members can be arrested simply for participation in religious activity or organization, independent of any military refusal.

So while conscientious objection does exist in practice there too (because Witnesses refuse military service), the bigger issue is that even ordinary religious life can itself trigger prosecution. The result is that some cases involve refusal of service, but many imprisonments have nothing to do with conscription at all.
The comparison you’re making

What you’re noticing is real, though:

    Ukraine: legal conflict over wartime obligation vs. conscientious objection

    Russia: broader suppression of the movement itself, with military refusal only one piece of it

So in Ukraine the state is saying, in effect, “we recognize your religion, but not as a wartime exemption.”
In Russia, the issue is closer to “we do not recognize the group’s legal religious status in practice at all.”

If you want, I can map how different countries treat conscientious objection more generally—it varies a lot across Europe and is surprisingly inconsistent even within the EU framework.

It's a tough one; when I was drafted I made it clear I would rather die than kill someone (not that I want to die either).  This was handled unofficially by using my linguistic skills and keeping me out of combat.  Religion had nothing to do with it.

That’s a very different route from formal conscientious objection, and in practice it’s often how militaries quietly solve the problem when they can.

What you describe—“I won’t kill, but I’m not invoking a religious exemption”—lands in a grey zone that institutions are generally quite pragmatic about. Militaries, especially in conscription systems, tend to have an interest in retaining people they’ve already trained and who are still useful in non-combat roles. So if someone is clearly not going to be effective or willing in a combat role but has valuable skills (like languages, intelligence work, logistics, translation, analysis), the system often adapts informally rather than escalating it into a legal or disciplinary confrontation.

In a sense, that’s a parallel track to formal conscientious objection, but without the ideological framing. Instead of “I cannot participate in war on moral/religious grounds,” it becomes “this person is better used elsewhere, and forcing the issue is counterproductive.”

There’s also an important distinction in what you said that often gets blurred in public debates: refusing to kill is not the same thing as refusing all military service. Many people who are absolutely not comfortable with lethal action can still participate in systems that support defense without directly engaging in violence. Armies historically rely heavily on that kind of functional differentiation.

Where this becomes philosophically interesting is that your position is actually quite close to classical conscientious objection in substance (a hard limit on lethal participation), but it is handled socially rather than institutionally. One is formalized and codified; the other is negotiated case by case.

And your closing remark—“religion had nothing to do with it”—also matters because it shows something often missed in discussions about conscientious objection: the underlying constraint is frequently personal ethics, temperament, or visceral aversion to killing rather than religious doctrine per se. Religion is just one of several frameworks people use to articulate a boundary that may already exist psychologically.

If anything, your experience highlights how flexible real systems tend to be when they encounter firm but non-performative resistance. The formal rules say one thing; the lived system often finds accommodations when it can.

I fully expected the brig; instead I found myself learning Vietnamese.

That contrast is striking—and it actually tells you quite a lot about how institutions behave in practice versus how they present their formal rules.

In theory, conscription systems tend to draw a hard line: orders are orders, and refusal can be treated as disciplinary or even criminal. But in practice, commanders and administrators are constantly doing a kind of quiet optimization. They’re balancing discipline, manpower needs, administrative hassle, and simple common sense. If someone is firmly unwilling to be placed in a combat role but is clearly useful elsewhere, it’s often easier to redirect them than to escalate into punishment.

Language skills are especially “high leverage” in that environment. If someone can reliably learn and operate in Vietnamese—or any operational language relevant to intelligence, liaison, or interpretation—that becomes a scarce asset. So what looks, from the outside, like a moral standoff can internally get reclassified as personnel sorting.

There’s also a psychological layer worth noting. You expected a rigid, punitive response (the brig), because that is what formal rules and cultural narratives about the military often emphasize. What you encountered instead was a system making a pragmatic decision: “We can either fight this person or use them.” And it chose the latter.

That gap between expectation and outcome is actually one of the most important things people learn about large institutions. They are less monolithic than they appear, and much more adaptive at the edges than their official doctrine suggests.

And there’s a slightly ironic symmetry in your outcome: you drew a hard moral line (“I won’t kill”), and instead of that line breaking you, the system routed you into a role where your skills mattered more than your refusal. The result wasn’t confrontation, but reallocation.

Vietnamese, in that sense, became the compromise space between principle and necessity.